


Something/Anything

by Menzosarres



Category: UnREAL (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 20:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14433456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menzosarres/pseuds/Menzosarres
Summary: After the finale-in-a-finale orchestrated just for Quinn doesn’t go exactly the way she planned, Rachel finds herself face to face with an unexpected confession from an unexpected visitor.aka a post-finale bridge-to-the-new-season fix-it





	Something/Anything

**Author's Note:**

> why is no one watching this glorious garbagefire gay show with me

“You’re here.” Rachel’s voice sticks at the end, flat and confused. She doesn’t step aside. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m always happy to see you, Quinn, but…”

The fact that Quinn hasn’t said a word since she finished banging on the rattly glass of Rachel’s door with the force of a vengeful sledgehammer is really throwing her off. She wants to say  _but last time you hunted me down, you wanted me to come back, and his time, you_  paid me _to leave._

Instead, she shrugs. “Just… didn’t expect the newer, more improved, even-more-on-top-of-the-world-than-ever Quinn King to trek out here for… well… anything.”

Anything.

What Quinn still hasn’t said.

I mean, hell. She’s been gone less than forty-eight hours. For Quinn to have followed her here, she must have left… And she must have left  _him_  after barely enough time to…

Quinn isn’t talking. Quinn isn’t saying a goddamn word. She’s just standing there, on Rachel’s freshly-purchased doorstep wearing a completely closed-off expression and a blood red skirt under the hand on her hip.

What the fuck is happening.

“Sorry if your heels got stuck in the lawn,” Rachel says just to cut the silence again. “I haven’t really had a chance to—”

Put down flagstones? Lay some brick? Roll out the red carpet? It’s been a  _day_. Rachel,  _shut up_. Shut up and stop babbling and wait her out. Let her say whatever she came to say.

She tamps down on words and taps her foot. Shifts her weight. Taps the other one.

Come  _on_ , Quinn. Out with it!

It’s too weird. It’s too quiet. “Do you… want the tour? I’ve done some… nothing. I haven’t done anything yet. My backpack’s in the bedroom. Because I’m camping. There’s no furniture. This isn’t exactly the best time for an unannounced—”

“I went to Chet.”

 _Finally!_ Rachel barely thinks the word before the meaning of what Quinn said catches up with the relief of her finally having said  _anything_. Quinn’s voice is like sand, rough and soft all at once and Rachel has always been a fan, but Quinn’s words give her a weird, sideways feeling in her gut, the kind of feeling she usually meets with dead eyes and a blank expression until she can sideways herself right out of the room.

She went to Chet.

It’s not like she didn’t know it would happen. She’d  _wanted_  it to—

“After we talked. I turned up at his door, grinning like a, like a lovesick  _idiot_ , and I went to say…” Quinn shakes her head, her ever-perfect bob looking a little limp as it sways, a little less sharp than when Rachel had caught a last glimpse of her disappearing through open walls of her jeep as she set out for here, for her personal patch of Quinn-less wilderness, where Quinn suddenly was. “…something. I don’t know. About… how nice it was to hear that from him, blah blah, touching, whatever. That he’d really— and that I— I felt— Gah!”

The exasperation radiates off her in waves.

“I couldn’t! I couldn’t do it! Nothing came out of my fucking mouth! I stood there like some kind of mute moron for a solid minute and a half! And you know the worst part? He still went for it! Made a move without even a  _hint_ of an apology because he’s such a desperate, egomaniacal man-child I didn’t even have to say one goddamn word for him to think he’d won the—the lottery— And I—”

All at once, Quinn’s mouth is scrunched up, her lashes beating quick-step staccato against the skin under her eyes.

“I already said it.” Her voice is tinny, choked. “Everything I wanted to say about, about meaning something to someone, even when you both know one of you is a—a dark, twisted wreck, and the other one is a selfish disaster, a screw-up, an old, tired,  _mean,_ dried-up—”

“Quinn—”

“No.” And it’s all Boss-Quinn again, finger up, stopping her protest with will alone. “Let me finish.”

Then her head goes back.

It’s a gesture Rachel knows. Intimately. Because she absorbed it directly from the woman in front of her, sucked it up like a sponge, that perfect chin-up fix for when you’re about to break down crying but desperately need to pull off exasperation, disdain. To turn tears into a performance of superiority, frustration anyone else should be  _ashamed_  of having put you through.  

But it’s still a vulnerability, too. No matter how well they perform it.

“I said it to you. I wanted to say it to—I  _only_  wanted to say it to you.”

And it all crashes down on Rachel’s head like the fixer-upper eaves are falling in.

“Oh,” she says, knowing her eyes must be comically wide, desperate but unable to blink.

And Quinn is just standing there, meeting her stare, somehow suddenly fearless, hands off hips, out in the air, palms half-open. Not asking. Just empty. Guileless.

Rachel feels like she could itch herself right out of her own skin.

“I—” she starts to say. Stops. “Fuck. Come in already. Stop standing on my doorstep like a… like you’re…”

“A beggar?” Quinn teases, a little lacking in edge. Maybe a little nervous. “A Mormon?”

But she crosses the threshold in three sharp clicks, tiny circles of dirt marring Rachel’s floors. She takes in the candles on the sill, the wide-open, sunset-lit emptiness. Rachel wonders if she’s thinking that she bought this for her. If she feels proud.

She hasn’t asked her in for the grand tour, though.

“I  _produced_  that.”

“I know.”

“Quinn, I—” Rachel freezes. “You  _know?”_

Quinn rolls her eyes. “God, don’t look so wounded.” She lets out a huff of air through her nose. “I figured it out on the way here, if that makes you feel better. Of course you produced that. Like the barbie could have come up with  _anything_  as ballsy as that wedding dress. I mean, my god.” She’s smiling again. But now it’s the Quinn smile, not the Quinn King smile. The real one. “Genius.”

The smile fades. “What I can’t figure out is why.”

It’s a bit chillier. Rachel can tell it’s half real, half in her head. The sun is all but gone, now. She could light candles, both for their intended purpose and to have something to do besides stand here and stare at a cold-eyed, prying Quinn, but that would mean she’d be standing here staring at a cold-eyed, prying Quinn by candlelight, and that would just be…

A lot.

So she sits on the windowsill instead, back to the outdoors, looking in on her—living room, she has to remind herself. This will be the living room. Because it gets more sun, and it would be stupid to waste that on a dining room she’ll never use. Because she’s going to be eating in her kitchen, alone, forever.

Except Quinn is going to stay for dinner. That much is inevitable. It’s too late to send her back to L.A. She’s got her camp stove and boxed mac and cheese and— Her brain is taunting her.

And Quinn is just… waiting.

“I wanted you to be happy,” she blurts. She’ll admit that much. More to silence her own thoughts than because she wants to have a real heart-to-heart about it. It’s the easiest answer she can give. Quinn already knows it’s true and Rachel isn’t hiding it… from herself. Not like the other stuff. Not like the feeling she’d gotten when Quinn asked her to help take out Gary, to help save her job, to sweep in with a personal favor for  _her_. Not for the show. Not for the network. Not for the ratings.

For Quinn.

Not how that suddenly made her feel alive again for the first time in months. Not the lengths she went to in a faster-than-ever-before downward spiral to keep that feeling going in all the wrong ways, trying to wheedle out pleasure from the next plot she could twist, trying to claw joy out of making the season end the way she wanted it to, trying to wrangle Quinn a happy ending along the way, even if her smile felt skinned while she was doing it, because Quinn  _deserves_  a happy ending, more than anyone, more than anything, so the twisting and pushing went on and on until it all played out like musical chairs, kids and kiddos falling into their impersonal little seats until she was the last one standing, and she could calmly exit the ring, exit stage left, get the hell out, mixed metaphors and wrecked relationships left in her wake and all.

Only now, Quinn is here, telling her… something… and that feeling is back. Back and competing with a kind of blind panic that makes her want to hurl.

“I thought—”

Quinn’s smile has gone indulgent. And that’s doing—something (damn that word,  _something)_ —to the feeling in Rachel’s gut.

“Chet, really? After all this time, you really thought he could make me happy?” She shakes her head. “You’re smarter than that.”

“I thought he could love you.” The words burn in her mouth. It takes her a minute to get the rest of it out. “You know.” She swallows thickly. “The right way. The way people who aren’t… who haven’t been…”

_Fuck!_

Now it’s her head that’s going back, nose up, like she can pour the emotions back into her eyes and down her throat and into whatever dark, dank cavern they came from, but that’s never going to work. Not with Quinn, the queen of the perfect glare even through shining eyes.

So she forces her chin down, forces herself to look at Quinn, really look at her.

And the look on Quinn’s face crushes the urge to run like a perfectly-placed stiletto to a palmetto bug.

 _Damaged,_ she finishes her sentence in her head. The way people who haven’t been damaged can do love, romance, happily ever afters. But she’s already arguing back, because she’s not. She’s not too damaged for this. Not now, under the roof of her own hard-won house, on her own patch of land, on her own goddamn terms.

She is  _not_  too damaged for Quinn King.

Not while Quinn is looking at her like she finally got an answer she’d been waiting for. An answer she  _knew_ was in there. Not while Quinn is looking at her like now that she’s gotten it, she’s too terrified to move.

It’s up to her, now. 

 _I thought he could love you_.  _The right way._

The words are burning a hole in Quinn’s brain. Because that’s why she came here, isn’t it? All the way out to this godforsaken bit of nowhere where it took her fifteen minutes to cross the lawn with her heels in the dirt like some displaced city porcupine forced belly-up on someone’s poopfest goat farm? To goad Rachel into admitting she had done all that, to taunt her into confessing she’d tried to send Quinn spiraling back into Chet’s wide open (too fucking wide open) arms?

I mean, sure, she’d been a little soft about it. Okay, a lot softer than her prickly, porcupine, blissfully black-tar soul had been working itself up to on the way here. But she’d done it. She’d won her confession. Rachel had produced her, she’d seen through it, stopped it, and called her out. Game, set, match.

Only she’s done it. She’s won her confession. And now she’s here, standing in Rachel’s… room—impossible to tell what room, really—and it’s sunset, and it’s  _cold_ , and Rachel is right there, less than two steps away. A second ago, she looked about ready to lose her shit, but now…

Now Rachel is just  _staring_ at her.

And now Rachel is taking those two steps Quinn had barely realized she still had on her side of the court.

And now they’re gone.

And Rachel kisses her. Hard. On the lips. Mouth closed, eyes closed even tighter, but it’s not fast enough to be friendly. Or a mistake.

“Oh,” Quinn says. Her lips purse, brow furrowing, in the inch of recoiled space between them.

“Oh?” Rachel echoes, and it sounds half angry, half terrified, and her eyes skip right and left across Quinn’s face like she’s daring her to throw her out of the room for it. Well, it’s Rachel’s room now. Kind of. Out of her life, then. But she did that already. Thrown with a blessing. This time, maybe she’d do the throwing with a curse.

“I wasn’t going to do that,” is all Quinn says.

It’s Rachel’s turn for confusion. “Um…”

The words don’t have to happen. Quinn knows.  _You didn’t do anything_. Yeah, Rachel had been the one to initiate the face-bruise, but Quinn had thought about it. A few times. A handful. Two handfuls. Generous handfuls. She was just never going to  _do it._  “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” she finally tosses out between them, trying for flippant, clipped, unaffected. “The thought has crossed my mind. But you’re… you. I’m the boss. Don’t think I haven’t heard the ‘mommy and daddy are fighting’ quips from all of you. And I’m not—”  _Chet._  She’s spiraling. She pulls back. “It could have been weird,” she finishes. “That’s all.”

Rachel is giving her that look. Like she’s ready to spit something out: either laughter, or a terrible, no-good, excellent, devious idea. Usually, Quinn loves that look. Right now, it makes her nervous. “But it’s not weird,” Rachel says, eyebrow twitching, teeth just showing below a half-smirked upper lip.

“Oh, no, it’s definitely still weird.” Quinn can feel herself nodding, lips tight and downturned, like she’s still fully in control. The head is a giveaway. Bobble-bobble. “Just not…” All she can think of is  _weird-weird,_ so she doesn’t say it.  “Oh, what the hell,” she mutters.

Grabs Rachel by the chin.

Pulls her back in.

Kissing is less weird than trying to talk about it.

And it feels a hell of a lot better, too.

Her grip is only tight for the second it takes Rachel’s lips to part. Then her claws melt away like off-season snow in the Sierras and it’s just her fingers against Rachel’s skin, her lips against Rachel’s. Kissing Rachel. Touching Rachel. Hmm.

She might need to have a conversation with Fiona after this.

Or not. She hates the kinds of conversations where she has to admit the party that isn’t her might have had a point about… things…

Mmm. Things. Like the taste of Rachel’s bottom lip, warm against the tip of her tongue, tingling with something that might have been some stupid goat-farm self-care tea and might have just been—

When Quinn feels herself sighing in the back of her throat, she admits it. Yeah. It’s all just Rachel.

“Come back,” she breathes against those stupid, delicious lips, and Rachel goes stiff as a board. Quinn scrambles to pull it together the way she wants it to be said. “No, wait, don’t bite my head off yet, Goldberg.” Her last name tastes funny, like it shouldn’t fit in the same mouth where she just had Rachel’s…

“Keep this,” she adds to hit the pause button on any more thinking about the kiss. Kisses. She waves an arm at the barely started renovations. “Keep your sanity space. You can come here on literally any day, any day you want. We can put it in your goddamn contract. Well, any day but a finale, but—”

“Quinn—” It’s not a no, but Quinn can hear the no hiding behind the pleading edge of her name. “I can’t do that. You know I can’t. I… I’ve done it. Every story I wanted to help tell on that show, every… every angle on contrived romance, every button that can be pushed to make a person do… anything… It’s done. I’m done.”

Quinn can feel herself pouting, and since she can see the edge to Rachel’s posture softening, she doesn’t even try to stop herself from doing it. Once in a while, a little childish can go a long way.  “What about our story?” She takes Rachel’s wrists in her hands, runs her fingers slowly up to her elbows, marveling in the sudden ability to touch Rachel whenever she wants to, however she wants to, instead of always having to bridge that stilted distance between them with an excuse first, usually something overemotional and understated and banal. This is just…

Oh. Sometime between elbows and waist, she’s lost track of the argument she was making and has just taken her brain wandering right along with her hands. Reel it back in, Quinn. Rewind. Play. “What about this?”

Rachel’s answering chuckle is nervous. “Quinn. Come on. You know we can’t tell  _our_  story.” She’s smiling, though, and it’s at least halfway to real. “There’s no romance, no competition, and way too much incriminating backstory.”

It’s Quinn’s turn to laugh, but she sobers quickly. “You’re right. Of course you are.”

Rachel’s eyes narrow. She’s right to be suspicious.  _That’s my girl._

“But what if  _I_  think there  _is_  a story you haven’t gotten to tell yet.” Her voice is teasing, enticing. “It’s a really,  _really_  good one.” God, she’s practically purring. “And one that can be completely, one-hundred-percent  _ours_.”

Her fingers are under Rachel’s shirt, now, reveling in smooth, bare skin. It’s just her sides. She’s had a hand here before, but it’s different, now. It’s too soon to think about more than that, about how she’s going to feel if Rachel goes beyond a rough kiss and a nervous caress, about Rachel seeing her,  _Rachel—_

But damn if she doesn’t want it anyway.

“What are you asking me, Quinn.”

“I’m not,” she quips, quick and reorienting. “I’m telling you. Next season, I’m going to make  _you_  a princess.”

As Rachel’s eyebrows rise in disbelief, Quinn decides it’s a plan best put on pause, at least for tonight. The kind of pause that will happen best if she tugs, digs her fingers in a bit deeper into the vulnerable skin of Rachel’s sides, pulls her, squirming and fighting a ticklish laugh, into her arms. Lets Rachel steal another kiss, lets her have it however she wants it, because it isn’t as though they’re filming the new season tomorrow.

She’s got months,  _months_ , to talk Rachel into the spotlight.

At this rate, it won’t take her more than a week.

**Author's Note:**

> yes it's a one-shot but if you think i could be persuaded to write the next several months where quinn 'it won't take more than a week' king gets sucked in to helping rachel 'i'm done' goldberg renovate her entire home because even though rachel was persuaded to go back by day two she's not admitting it because the leverage to make quinn king use a hammer? is an ExCELLENT thing...?
> 
> you would be correct.


End file.
